The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Well, there’s my answer,” said Jill. “End of story. Thank you.” She was quiet for a second, and then she said, “I guess that’s what you talk about with her. That’s what the closeness is all about: her love affair! She talks, and you listen. You’ve always been a good listener, Amy.”

  “Just stop, Jill, okay?” Amy said. “Penny and I do have an actual friendship, despite what you think. And listen, I have to reiterate: None of you can discuss this with anyone, okay?”

  “So who’s the lover?” Jill asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Amy. “No one you know. A museum person.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Karen suddenly said, because she could not suppress it any longer, “is how she can be so disloyal.”

  “She needed someone to talk to,” Amy explained. “We had an intense moment together, back when Dustin Kavanaugh got mugged. And she just basically blurted it out.”

  “No,” said Karen, “I mean the affair.” Whenever Karen Yip learned of someone’s marital infidelity, she felt immediate distaste.

  “And excuse me, but you’re actually going on vacation with the Ramseys over winter break?” asked Jill.

  Karen was lightly appalled, but she had no personal stake in this; Jill, however, sounded almost furious with Amy. Everyone knew that ever since Jill had moved away, Amy had sometimes ignored her in favor of this glamorous museum director, this newly revealed marital cheater.

  “I barely know him,” Amy said in a small voice.

  “But you’re going to sit around with them the whole time,” Jill went on, “knowing what you know? And knowing that Greg doesn’t know? Does Leo know too?”

  “I told you, no one does except you.”

  “Mommy, I have to yuniate,” Nadia suddenly said. Karen had nearly forgotten she was there.

  “Urinate,” Jill said. “Oh, honey, now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Jill turned to the others and said, “Wait for me, okay?” She headed out into the woods behind her daughter, and Karen was grateful for the distraction from the awkwardness of Amy and Jill staring each other down. Karen had never had a friendship with another woman as close as theirs, and she’d never wanted one. She had all that she needed with Wilson; there was no reason to look anywhere else.

  Within a moment they all heard Jill say, “More privacy? Well, where do you want me to go, Nadia?”

  “Over there.”

  Then there were footsteps and the parting of branches, and Jill said, “Okay, Nadia, I’m over there. You’ve got more privacy now.”

  They heard a sizzle of urine falling onto a bed of leaves; it was such a personal moment, and it seemed strangely invasive to be listening like this, just as it had begun to seem invasive to be here at the campgrounds at all. The twins had been doing fine without their mother and without the goggles. Their faces, viewed briefly through the branches and the yellow light of the equipment they would not use this weekend, had evinced no sorrow. They had moved on from their great goggles-yearning; they had adapted. The women would drive back to New York City as quietly as they had come, and there they would wait for their men to return the next day.

  Karen knew mothers at the school who said they had given up their jobs for their children. Sometimes they said they had done it for both their husbands and their children. “I just like to be there at the end of the school day,” Amy had recently said at the Golden Horn. “I like the idea of being there for Mason, at least for now. It’s not going to last much longer.”

  But Karen had not given up her job for her sons or for Wilson. She knew precisely whom she had given it up for, at least originally: her parents, her mother-in-law, and all her relatives who lived in either the New York or the San Francisco Chinatown, among streets strong with fish heads and star anise. Whenever Karen’s parents came to visit—both now retired and living in a senior citizens’ complex in the Bay Area, thanks to Wilson’s continual generosity—they marveled in Chinese at the two-floor apartment, the built-in shelving in the twins’ bedrooms, and the enormous SUV, perhaps bigger than the vessel on which the Tang relatives had long ago set sail from Jiangsu Province. Karen’s parents, still seemingly tired from having worked for so long in a restaurant kitchen, her father limping slightly for obscure reasons, her mother waddling a little, walked up and down the stairs of the duplex with satisfaction. Karen’s mother started to cry when she picked up a particularly ornate silver dish, saying, “This pretty as anything.”

  After the twins were born early and in such turmoil, and everyone worried that they might have intellectual deficits (that proved laughable, for they were mathematically brilliant boys), Karen knew she would not return to her statistical analysis job for a long time. Her parents had essentially told the relatives, “Karen stays home with the twins, but she does not need to go back to work, ever, even when they are older. Her husband Wilson the banker makes so much money that they live in a two-floor apartment in New York City, and she never has to work again in her life.” The relatives were suitably impressed.

  Karen knew she was supposed to dissuade them from thinking this way. But the enjoyment she felt when her mother and father flew across the country business class, paid for by Wilson, and then walked around the apartment fussing over the shining objects and commenting on the fact that Karen had a husband who could take care of everything, was profound.

  Once, back when the twins started kindergarten and Karen mentioned during a telephone call to her parents that she was vaguely thinking of returning to work, her mother had said in an alarmed voice, “Wilson he lose his job?”

  “What?” Karen said. “You’re talking nonsense, Ma. Of course not.”

  “Then why do you want to go to work?” her mother asked. “Work made my hands look like cut-up pieces of gingerroot.”

  “I didn’t work with my hands,” Karen said, knowing her words were snotty, and she was ashamed. Perhaps her brain looked like gingerroot, gnarled from all the numbers she had pushed through it, distorting its shape. She didn’t need to work, and this fact was a gift to her mother and father, former employees of the Ideal Dumpling Palace in San Francisco, who could not fathom the different components of their daughter’s life but knew enough to be dazzled.

  It was a gift to them as well as an excuse, but whatever it was, over the years Karen’s vague desire to work rarely got specific. She didn’t question her own feelings very often, except once in a while when she imagined herself accepting a position as a statistical analyst working for one of the most prestigious firms possible. But the fantasy halted there, because she didn’t actually want another job yet, though still she accepted interviews. She was given tours of the facility and shown the view from corner offices and told all about the corporate trip to Maui taken by all the top-level analysts.

  But really, Karen enjoyed her life as it was. She had a view already; she could go to Maui on her own. Her life had aesthetic and airy dimensions; it wasn’t hectic or brutal, ugly or frantic, like her family life as a child. Now she kept freesia in a vase in the front hall, which Wilson liked, and commented on. Sometimes she attended a morning concert, sitting and listening to chamber music in a room full of retirees and other women. Soon she might learn to speak Italian at one of those language schools, because it was such a beautiful language. She shopped at Camarata & Bello a few times a week, even though she still had a strong memory of the time her water had broken there, and even though the prices were so ridiculous that everyone said it was criminal. But when she brought home the little containers of bright salads flecked with currants and Aztec grains, she thought about how extraordinary it was that she had reached a point in her life at which she could have comfort and serenity and luxury. Wilson liked seeing her happy; he told her this frequently. Her happiness, he said, inspired him; the nape of her neck inspired him; the way she mothered their sons inspired him; her mathematical intelligence inspired him too.

  “Is it selfish of me?” she had asked him once in bed. “Y
ou work all the time.” But Wilson reminded her that he loved working all the time; he was treated very well at the bank, and he couldn’t imagine doing anything else with his life or retiring early on the money they’d made, the way some people did. He had no interest in golf or woodworking or taking cycling trips through British Columbia. He wanted to stay a banker forever, in the beautiful suits that his wife liked to help him choose, sitting behind the broad surface of his desk, on which the papers lay in geometrical and beguiling piles. And she wanted to create a home for him that was calm, exquisite.

  Karen was genuinely grateful for what they had, and she and Wilson gave a lot of money to charity every year. Their names appeared on the donors page of the programs from various charity events, listed under the category “High Hurdlers,” or “Foundation Builders,” or “Director’s Circle,” alongside the names of other couples, and sometimes several corporations. “Giving back,” people called it, strangely. Karen knew how privileged she was. After she had asked Wilson that question about whether she was selfish, she felt almost no residual ambivalence about her own desire to make her family life run beautifully, and to stay in one place, eating an expensive little salad from its container. All that she lacked was more direct contact with numbers and number theory.

  In the distance now, Karen heard Jill’s voice suddenly rising up. She was calling out something about Nadia, who apparently had wandered off a few yards into the woods for privacy, and Jill couldn’t find her right away and was suddenly quietly hysterical. So they all hurried in the direction of Jill’s voice, pushing through the trees and out into the clearing that the men and boys had so recently occupied. There was a little light from the moon now, and from the lit path to the cabins, but no sense of life anywhere around them.

  “Nadia!” they called. “Nadia!” She’d been right here.

  “We’ll find her in two seconds, Jill,” said Karen.

  They moved their flashlights in widening circles around the trees and patches of dark sky. “Nadia! Nadia!” they called.

  “Something is not quite right with her,” Jill whispered to the others.

  “She’s just dreamy, Jill,” Amy said. “Nadia! Nadia!”

  “I feel as though she has no idea of where she is in the world,” Jill went on, aching and frantic. “She sings that sad song: ‘Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree.’”

  “Our yoga mantra,” said Roberta, for they used Nadia’s song at the end of every yoga session now.

  “Maybe she’s still in trauma,” Jill said. “Nadia! Nadia! How can I know anything about her? Nadia!”

  “I don’t know anything about the twins either,” Karen offered. “Your kids just live with you. When I brought the boys home from the NICU, I thought, Who are you?”

  “I’m sure she’s just past these trees,” said Amy.

  “Sometimes I actually think I should have left her there,” Jill said in a whisper.

  “Where?” asked Roberta, straining to hear.

  “In Russia. She could have grown up and worked in a grocery store. Her name tag would have been written in Cyrillic. She would have been Manya instead of being forced into my stupid fantasies. As if,” Jill whispered in an aching voice, “she was really going to be graceful and a self-starter like Nadia Comaneci.”

  The other women looked at her, shocked. “Who knows what she would have been like?” Amy finally said, because someone had to say something. “Is there one life we’re supposed to be living? Look at us. You won that prize for being the most promising.”

  “Yes, the Vivian Swope,” said Jill. “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “I’m sorry, Jill, I didn’t mean it that way,” Amy said. “I didn’t mean, ‘Oh, you won the prize, and now look at you.’ I just meant, you know, life is never this straight path.”

  “I know that,” said Jill after a moment. And at that instant they found Nadia sitting in the dirt and hugging herself tightly in the cold. When she saw them she leapt up and threw herself against her mother.

  “Honey, thank God!” said Jill as her daughter clung to her waist. “How could you have gotten lost?”

  “It wasn’t my fault, Mom!”

  “I didn’t mean it was. I am so glad you’re all right. But didn’t you hear us calling? I was so worried. But you’re fine now, you’re fine.”

  Nadia kept sobbing, no matter how much her mother told her it was all right, it was fine, everything was okay. Wasn’t there something that Jill could say to make her feel better? Even Karen, with her sequenced mind that missed nuance where others easily found it, could quickly comfort her children. Only a mother—not just a mother but the mother—could extinguish fear; yet Jill seemed unable to put aside her own fear and locate the one private little thing Nadia needed right then that would change everything.

  Karen’s friends often complained to one another that they had trouble with direction and that whenever they looked at a map while sitting in the passenger’s seat with their husbands driving, they needed to turn it upside down in order to get a sense of where they were in relation to everything else. Karen never knew what they were talking about; why would you turn a map upside down? She let them all into the SUV now and drove them swiftly back down toward the city. This time they didn’t stop at all, and she didn’t bother to translate miles into kilometers in her mind, and they made it home in very good time.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, when the men and the boys returned from the weekend, Karen felt relieved. Wilson asked her what she had been doing in their absence, and she told him not much. It seemed easier right now not to say that she and her friends had driven up with the goggles in hand; one day, later on in the week, she would tell him. She didn’t like keeping secrets from Wilson, no matter how innocent. She planned to tell him everything: about their adventure, about how Nadia had gotten lost in the woods, and about how Penny Ramsey was cheating on her husband. There would be no reason not to tell him all of this; he was the most discreet and trustworthy man she had ever known.

  For now, though, she didn’t say anything. She put the goggles back on the front hall table, and there they sat in their box, embedded in their casing.

  “Dad forgot to pack these,” one of the twins said with indignation when he saw them there.

  “I know. But did you have fun anyway?” she asked, and both boys admitted that yes, they had had a lot of fun. They had built a campfire, they said, and had sung folk songs, and had taken a hike in the freezing woods, and had gotten up in the morning and cooked oatmeal in a big iron pot over logs.

  In bed, Wilson told Karen that he was so tired from the overnight that his bones ached, and she rubbed the back and neck of her beautiful husband, then shut off the light. They would both be asleep soon—they were equally easy sleepers—but Karen said it anyway, because no night would have been complete if they didn’t engage in this ritual.

  “Lucas primes?” she asked.

  “Sure. Jump in somewhere.”

  “2207.”

  “3571.”

  “9349,” said Karen Yip.

  And so on and so on, until they had gone as far as they could go.

  Chapter TWELVE

  San Francisco, 1975

  WHEN THE KITCHEN got so hot that the cook fainted, it was time to put in a fan. But the fan didn’t work so well, and soon the line cooks started to weaken one by one. Everyone tilted a little, but no one tipped. Chu Hua Tang stood steady at the stove with the tongs, plucking dumplings out of the rolling water. When she left at the end of the night and walked outside onto Stockton Street, the chilly air smacked her face like cold water. It was too cold here in San Francisco; you could never get comfortable, either inside or outside. The temperature was wrong. But no one had ever said that life was going to be comfortable.

  She had grown up seeing her two brothers die. They had a disease that had no name, or at least she could not remember the Chinese name for it. But here everyone had vitamins to keep them well. Chu Hua Tang believed in the power of vitamins, but
she had to force them down her children’s throats. “Take them!” she said, giving them to the boy, Kevin, and to the girl, Karen. Kevin swallowed them easy. Karen said, “Ma, I hate the smell. They smell like a wet dog. And I don’t like the feeling of the big pill in my throat. I will choke.”

  “You will not choke,” Chu Hua said. “Take them, take them!” The vitamins did always stink in their brown bottle, but the smell was a sign of their potency; they would keep her children strong. She had bought them at the big drugstore that stood kitty-corner from the Ideal Dumpling Palace. She had bought them on payday, and her hands had pulsed with pleasure at being able to make the purchase. So how could her daughter complain? She was selfish: a selfish little girl. It made Chu Hua furious.

  She often came home from work furious. You were supposed to leave the hot kitchen and go out into the cold night, and then go home to your family, as if you would then be able to enjoy one another. “How was your day?” people asked in San Francisco. Or, worse, they called out, “Have a good day!”

  But at home, her son, Kevin, was always waiting by the door, ready to leave, saying, “Ma, I have to meet Chris and Danny in five minutes to go play Pong.” He spent all the money that he earned as a messenger playing this stupid game at the arcade nearby, where he stood in front of a machine with his friends and poked his head into it. Karen, though, was always in her room studying. Chu Hua was supposed to like this and be proud of her, but it often irritated her to see the girl lounging on her bed with a math book, yawning with her mouth open, revealing her tongue, the way Americans sometimes did, so immodestly.

  “You could help set the table,” Chu Hua said to Karen. “I have to come home and take care of everything here too? I have to work at home, like it is restaurant?”

  Karen was eight. She was helpful only when you pushed her; she would finally put down the book and say, “Okay, Ma, okay.” Then, still yawning, as though she had been working all day too, Karen would stagger into the kitchen and say, flatly, “What do you want me to do?”